Ooblets Shows Off Card-Based Dance Battle Mechanics

Glumberland, the developers of farming sim/monster collecting game Ooblets, showed off a demo featuring their new dance battle system at PAX West. The new system makes use of card battles, seen in games like Slay the Spire, in order to defeat other teams of the titular creatures in dance battles.

Ooblets originally had a more traditional Pokémon-esque battle system where teams of Ooblets would fight each other. This changed with an announcement shown in the E3 2018 trailer:

In their September dev diary, Glumberland explained a bit how the dance battle system will work. Instead of having a variety of moves with individual cooldowns, players can now play up to three (for now) cards per turn as long as they have the action points (called “beats”) to play them. The player gets access to three moves per turn, with some moves allowing the player to draw more cards. Each Ooblet can learn up to 15 moves, and all the moves are shuffled into a deck during a battle. These moves, which Ooblets learn by gaining levels, will be upgradable by spending crops and other ingredients the player can grow or collect.

In dance battles, participants have “ego” instead of health, and the goal is to reduce your opponents’ ego to zero by showing off your best dance moves. The new battle system announcement adds status effects to the mix. To avoid the confusion from variable buff/debuff durations in older versions, they now simply last one turn (stunning) or they last the entire battle (power boosts/reductions and ego draining) unless cleared by certain moves.

The dance battle system is still very much in testing, so many features are prone to change for balancing. Ooblets is expected to release sometime in 2019 for Steam and Xbox One. You can follow the game’s progress on the official website or their Twitter.